Lines: Diagonals

In this section I took a look at diagonal lines in the frame to see how they activated an image.

From an off centre viewpoint the lines created by these steps can be seen as diagonals as the come from the upper left of the frame down towards the lower right. They help to draw your eye from the man sitting on the right to the people walking on the left.

In this shot the row of trees is taken at an angel so that it makes an implied diagonal working its way to the back of the frame. This is a useful way of making the viewer feel that they are being drawn deep into the picture by following the implied lines to the furthest point in the background.

 

 

This time I stood straight on to the buildings but adjusted the angle of the camera to make the buildings feel like they were sloping, and the natural horizontal lines within the photo then become diagonals within the frame. As I stated with my horizontal pictures, horizontal lines created a feeling of balance, but now that the image is tilted, it makes the shot feel off balance, creating a sliding movement through the piece as if you could just slip off the end! It makes for an unusual tension in a piece if something should naturally be level and is shot in a way that it appears unbalanced.

My last image was off some flags that were flying above me. Again by changing my viewpoint they became a diagonal through the frame instead of the horizontal they would have been had I shot them from a position stood back from them. Instead I stood below them to create the diagonal.

There are very few natural diagonals to shoot images off, but by changing your view point or adjusting the angle of the frame can make the images feel off balanced and this sense of movement is useful for making the viewer travel in the direction of a specific subject in the frame. I quite like how some diagonal lines in shots make the viewer feel off balanced, I may experiment more with this in the future.